Full Description
Over more than fifty years at the New Yorker, E. B. White came to define a kind of ideal American prose: clear, casual, democratic, and urbane. He also did more than any writer to define his favourite city. His classic Here Is New York captured a moment in the life of Manhattan with precision and love—but his was no fleeting infatuation. In New York Sketches, the first collection of his casual pieces about the city, White ranges at whim from the nesting habits of pigeons to the aisles of a calculator trade-show on Eighth Avenue, from the behaviour of snails in aquariums to the ghosts of old romance that haunt a flower shop or a fire escape or an old hotel. These sketches, some less than a page long, many written for a laugh, or in response to the news of the day, show us White at his most playful and inventive.
New York Sketches is a welcome diversion for every New Yorker—native, adoptive, or far from home—and a perfect introduction, not only to what White called "the inscrutable and lovely town," but to the everyday enchantments of one of her fondest reporters.
Contents
Foreword by Martha White
MANNERS
Notes & Comment: July 16, 1932
Defense of the Bronx River
Notes & Comment: February 18, 1928
Notes & Comment: November 29, 1952
Definitions
Notes & Comment: July 3, 1954
Notes & Comment: March 24, 1945
Window Box
Notes & Comment: December 4, 1948
Notes & Comment: July 17, 1954
Notes & Comment: November 5, 1949
Notes & Comment: November 29, 1952
Notes & Comment: July 3, 1937
Notes & Comment: February 19, 1943
The Rock Dove
Notes & Comment: May 11, 1935
Lines in Anguish
Daisy at One Fifth Ave
Daisy at Schrafft's
Interview with Daisy
Notes & Comment: October 6, 1923
The Gastropods
The Wings of Orville
Reading Room
Notes & Comment: January 16, 1937
Notes & Comment: January 6, 1951
The Lady Is Cold
MEMORIES & INVENTIONS
Obituary
Business Show
The Hour of Letdown
The Street of the Dead
The Retort Transcendental
Child's Play
Journeys
The Hotel of the Total Stranger
Goodbye to 48th Street
Gramercy Park
Getting Away
Notes & Comment: June 11, 1955
